The past is what happened. History is what we remember and write about that past, the narratives we craft to make sense out of our memories and their sources. But what does it mean to look at the past and to remember that nothing happened? Why might we feel as if nothing is the way it was? This book transforms these utterly ordinary observations and redefines Nothing as something we have known and can remember.
Nothing has been a catch-all term for everything that is supposedly uninteresting or is just not there. It will take some--possibly considerable--mental adjustment before we can see Nothing as Susan A. Crane does here--with a capital n. But Nothing has actually been happening all along. As Crane shows in her witty and provocative discussion, Nothing is nothing less than fascinating.
When Nothing has changed but we think that it should have, we might call that injustice; when Nothing has happened over a long, slow period of time, we might call that boring. Justice and boredom have histories. So too does being relieved or disappointed when Nothing happens--for instance, when a forecasted end of the world does not occur, and millennial movements have to regroup. By paying attention to how we understand Nothing to be happening in the present, what it means to know Nothing or to do Nothing, we can begin to ask how those experiences will be remembered.
Susan A. Crane moves effortlessly between different modes of seeing Nothing, drawing on visual analysis and cultural studies to suggest a new way of thinking about history. By remembering how Nothing happened, or how Nothing is the way it was, or how Nothing has changed, we can recover histories that were there all along.
Автор: Trott, SusanНазвание: Crane Spreads WingsISBN: 0385506910 ISBN-13(EAN): 9780385506915 Издательство: Random House (USA)Рейтинг: Цена: 1379.00 р. Наличие на складе: Есть у поставщика Поставка под заказ.
Автор: Wicks SusanНазвание: Dear CraneISBN: 178037528X ISBN-13(EAN): 9781780375281 Издательство: НеизвестноРейтинг: Цена: 1576.00 р. Наличие на складе: Есть у поставщика Поставка под заказ.Описание: A giant crane appears at the back windows of a residential street, its red `eye` overlooking lives on the other side of the glass where Susan Wicks writes searchingly about our ordinary existence, its serendipities and unreliable sense-impressions. By the time the crane leaves, the landscape we knew will have changed and we too will have moved on.
Автор: Susan CraneНазвание: Animal Encounters: Contacts and Concepts in Medieval BritainISBN: 0812244583 ISBN-13(EAN): 9780812244588 Издательство: Wiley EDCРейтинг: Цена: 9265.00 р. Наличие на складе: Есть у поставщика Поставка под заказ.Описание: Traces of the living animal run across the entire corpus of medieval writing and reveal how pervasively animals mattered in medieval thought and practice. In fascinating scenes of cross-species encounters, a raven offers St. Cuthbert a lump of lard that waterproofs his visitors' boots for a whole year, a scholar finds inspiration for his studies in his cat's perfect focus on killing mice, and a dispossessed knight wins back his heritage only to give it up again in order to save the life of his warhorse. Readers have often taken such encounters to be merely figurative or fanciful, but Susan Crane discovers that these scenes of interaction are firmly grounded in the intimate cohabitation with animals that characterized every medieval milieu from palace to village. The animal encounters of medieval literature reveal their full meaning only when we recover the living animal's place within the written animal.The grip of a certain humanism was strong in medieval Britain, as it is today: the humanism that conceives animals in diametrical opposition to humankind. Yet medieval writing was far from univocal in this regard. Latin and vernacular works abound in other ways of thinking about animals that invite the saint, the scholar, and the knight to explore how bodies and minds interpenetrate across species lines. Crane brings these other ways of thinking to light in her readings of the beast fable, the hunting treatise, the saint's life, the bestiary, and other genres. Her substantial contribution to the field of animal studies investigates how animals and people interact in culture making, how conceiving the animal is integral to conceiving the human, and how cross-species encounters transform both their animal and their human participants.
Traces of the living animal run across the entire corpus of medieval writing and reveal how pervasively animals mattered in medieval thought and practice. In fascinating scenes of cross-species encounters, a raven offers St. Cuthbert a lump of lard that waterproofs his visitors' boots for a whole year, a scholar finds inspiration for his studies in his cat's perfect focus on killing mice, and a dispossessed knight wins back his heritage only to give it up again in order to save the life of his warhorse. Readers have often taken such encounters to be merely figurative or fanciful, but Susan Crane discovers that these scenes of interaction are firmly grounded in the intimate cohabitation with animals that characterized every medieval milieu from palace to village. The animal encounters of medieval literature reveal their full meaning only when we recover the living animal's place within the written animal.The grip of a certain humanism was strong in medieval Britain, as it is today: the humanism that conceives animals in diametrical opposition to humankind. Yet medieval writing was far from univocal in this regard. Latin and vernacular works abound in other ways of thinking about animals that invite the saint, the scholar, and the knight to explore how bodies and minds interpenetrate across species lines. Crane brings these other ways of thinking to light in her readings of the beast fable, the hunting treatise, the saint's life, the bestiary, and other genres. Her substantial contribution to the field of animal studies investigates how animals and people interact in culture making, how conceiving the animal is integral to conceiving the human, and how cross-species encounters transform both their animal and their human participants.